Asking Again, at the 11th Shanghai Biennale

by Ysabelle Cheung

The newly commissioned multi-part MOUSEN+MSG installation, titled The Great Chain of Being – Planet Trilogy (2016), was impressively situated on the first floor of the Power Station of Art. Visitors were encouraged to enter an abandoned space shuttle, which then leads to a series of underground chambers that narrate the trilogy of “Infinite Perspective,” “The End of Time,” and “Towards Darkness.” Over 40 artists collaborated for this work, focusing on three key references: Red Flag Canal, Samuel Beckett and William Shakespeare. Courtesy Power Station of Art, Shanghai.

At the 11th Shanghai Biennale, curators Raqs Media Collective made a radical proposal. The 92 participating artists from 40 countries were asked to architect imagined futures, encounters and narratives from within Asia—and with those resulting works, the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) restructured the various levels and sections of the Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai into connected archipelagos of intersecting desires.

“Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories” encompassed three floors of the gargantuan state-run museum, divided into four sections: Terminals, in which expressive bodies of work augmented ideas within PSA; Infra-Curatorial Platform, in which sub-exhibitions were mounted; Theory Opera, which dissolved the boundaries between thought and practice; and 51 Personae, in which invited participants shared multimedia stories across the city of Shanghai. Raqs Media Collective claimed to enjoy “lingering in discussions around the limit: the limit of the perfect question,” and provoked artists to question the nature of thresholds—of the East-West dichotomy, imagination and art itself—with a series of unexpected sources including a 7th century star map, the 1974 film Jukti, Takko aar Gappo (Reason, Debate, and a Story) and the novel The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. In the novel, a self-destructive stellar system faces complete extinction due to chaotic gravitational forces, which have forced 11 of 12 planets to collide with the sun. The remaining planet is also headed the same way; for its citizens, each scalding sunrise is a reminder of the imminent termination of life.

A video installation by SHIZHENG as part of Mousen+MSG’s The Great Chain of Being (2016), in which nonuniformity, especially cracks, in the weathered surface of a planet are documented and scrutinized on a microscopic level. All photos by Ysabelle Cheung for ArtAsiaPacific, unless otherwise stated.

Variations on the American Sign Language action for the word “future”—two facing-out palms drawing semi-circles away from the face—are sketched out in CHRISTINESUNKIM’s “Future Series” (2015–16). On the right is “when a future trips and falls” and the far left, a sketch of the tiny “hopeful future.”

Two faceless porters unpack a portable bed designed by Louis Vuitton in Zero Latitude (2014) by BIANCABALDI. The bed, which was custom-made for the French explorer Savorgnan de Brazza in his journeys to Congo, is at once a coveted luxury item and a repulsive symbol of trauma and loneliness triggered by imperialism.

In Plastic Raft of Lampedusa (2016) by GRAHAMHARWOOD/YOHA, the artist dismantles a boat and neatly arranges each portion, as if to juxtapose the components’ known weight, function and aesthetic against the sea’s volatile and temperamental behavior. The audience must ponder one question: what holds a body on the surface at sea, or allows it to drown?

In a darkened room, TOMASSARACENO’s Sonic Cosmic Webs (2016) are spotlit, illuminating the forms of live spiders as well as the delicate “tiny universes” they weave. Courtesy Power Station of Art, Shanghai.

Hidden in a corner of PSA are 49 standing electric fans by YIN YI, each programmed to run for five minutes, stop for five minutes, and then restart the cycle. The programming limits the fans to blow wind within the marked boundary, and never in another direction.

Every once in a while, a dancer arrived to perform LEEMINGWEI’s Our Labyrinth (2015– ) in the entrance hall of PSA, where a round pile of rice grains would be sitting unnoticed in the center of the floor. Using a straw hair broom, he gently swept them into swirls and patterns.

Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta of the RAQSMEDIACOLLECTIVE perform JIMENACANALES’ Einstein and Bergson in Three Acts: On Physics and Philosophy (ACT I: The Debate) (2016) as part of “Theory Opera,” where theoretical reflections are performed in a variety of multimedia.

The Biennale also presented terrifying, not-too-distant imagined scenarios. Post-apocalyptic landscapes, rendered in Mousen+MSG’s underground theme park, were complete with technological waste and a live bee-infested tree. Our own identities unfolded in profound and disturbing ways, as enacted in Olivier De Sagazan’s gendered performance Transfiguration. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s So Far (2016) built tension, in which two giant forklifts continually attempt to pull apart compressed crocks. But hopeful futures were explored too, reflected in Christine Sun Kim’s sketch series based on the gesture for “future” in American Sign Language, and Lee Mingwei’s poetic Our Labyrinth (2015– ), featuring a dancer silently brushing golden rice grains across PSA’s cold, concrete floors.

These scenarios coalesced to produce more questions, rather than answers or blame; as Raqs Media Collective co-founder Monica Narula stated, the biennale was “not exactly about what we have done, but how we can live, and do live, in these contemporary conditions.” But it seemed to point out—perhaps even more poignantly given that 2016 was fraught with instability—the impossibility of the infinite. When will the forklifts pull apart the crocks, releasing whatever unknown contents sealed within? How soon before economies are run aground, our capital is depleted and nations, or what’s left of them, are laid to waste? How will we survive the collapse of our constructed societies? Most importantly, what happens next?

At the front of PSA is SUNYUAN and PENG YU’s So Far (2016), which demonstrates immense tension as two forklifts attempt to pull apart three crocks, which are suctioned together by a vacuum pump constantly evacuating air.

For Seven Days (2013), WANGHAICHUAN collected furniture and homeware thrown out by former residents of the Chongqing Copper Cash Manufactory’s apartments, which were destroyed in 2001.

Masked workers are the protagonists in this five-screen video work by YANGZHENZONG. Instead of being used as a shield or to unify the workers into one image —one common face—the masks are instead replicas of each person in the film, serving to intensify their personal features.

MERIEMBENNANI is the biennale’s first participating artist. She created a playful video and carpet installation in MOUNAMEKOUAR’s “Flying House” sub-exhibition, one of the seven within the biennale that make up the “Infra-Curatorial Platform” section.

Erasure and redaction create traumatizing atmospheres, even when rendered as a scrape of paper lifted from a photograph. Here, KHALEDBARAKEH powerfully addresses our increasing indifference to the bodies—and lives—that are disappearing in the current refugee crisis.

In OLIVIER DE SAGAZAN’s performance Transfiguration (2016), a smartly dressed man sits on a stage, washing his face. Cracks of madness and distress soon appear as he rubs clay on his body, and smears himself with red and black pigments. For his finale, the artist transforms himself unsuccessfully into a female, with clay breasts and a poorly attached merkin, all of which then becomes material for a grotesque “baby” which he shapes out of the various leftovers from his transfiguration. End, and repeat.